Apart
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Booth struggles with how everything seems to have changed in the wake of Brennan's return, and in the middle of the night turns to the only thing that feels the same between them. Includes a tiny spoiler detail from Episode 8x2 promos. Sequel to "Empty," "Numb," and "Raw."


**Apart**

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**By: **dharmamonkey  
**Rated: **M  
**Disclaimer: **Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those little moments that Hart and friends leave out. In this case, a peek into Booth's angst in the wake of his reunion with Brennan and their awkward attempt to resume their life together.

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**A/N: **_Do note that there's a teeny, tiny spoiler here for 8x2. Also, like the preceding story in this series ("Raw"), an "UNF Alert" applies to what follows. If you don't like reading that sort of thing, or shouldn't be because you're too young, stop now. All others, welcome and enjoy!_

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I woke up early, before the alarm, but just stared up into the darkness, looking at the shadows on the ceiling cast by the moonlight shining through the oak tree outside our bedroom window.

I could hear her breathing, tiny little snores that rattled in her throat as she slept next to me, her mouth hanging open a bit as she lay on her side. I rolled over a little and saw her hands held up in front of her face almost as if in prayer. She murmured quietly, smacking her lips a couple of times before she settled back into slumber.

Everything else was quiet. The breeze the had been blowing a few minutes before had stopped. The antique school clock that was mounted on the wall across from our bed had fallen silent, signaling that it was time for me to take out the key and wind it up again. The automatic coffeemaker downstairs hadn't kicked on yet, because there was still almost an hour to go before the alarm would go off. The baby monitor was stone silent.

Before they left, Christine would wake us up at least once during the night, but now that they're back, she was sleeping all the way through the night. My baby girl's now more of a girl and less of a baby than she was before, and I missed it. I missed it all. I didn't get to see any photos to see how my little girl was growing, or videos to watch and hear her babbling chatter, or even a letter from Bones telling me how they were doing. I got nothing. Three months they were away and all of it is a total void. In the week since they've been back, I find myself realizing how much I missed.

Christine likes bananas, prunes and pears but she hates peaches in her mushy baby food, although she'll tolerate the peach/pumpkin/apricot stuff made by one of the fancy organic brands which she got once in a while when Bones & Max had the money to splurge on the fancy baby food. Bones can cook breakfast—pancakes, waffles, French toast, and eggs to order (scrambled, sunny side up, over easy, over medium, over hard or poached)—because she worked as a hash-slinging fry cook at a family-run diner off U.S. 17 in New Bern, North Carolina. We were sitting on the couch the other day, and I was flipping back and forth between the Penn State/Temple game and the Braves/Phillies game, and Bones mentioned to me that she was rooting for the Braves.

"What?" I coughed.

"We had a lot of discretionary time, my dad and I, while we were evading arrest," she'd explained matter of factly. "And because it was summer, and most of the budget motels we were staying at had only very basic cable service, there was often very little to watch on television other than sports and whatever insipid situational comedies were on the major networks. So we watched a lot of baseball. Dad's always been a huge Cubs fan, but since we spent a fair amount of time in places that had TBS, I found myself watching quite a number of Braves games. I came to the know the players and—"

_Bones—my Bones—watching baseball? And actually understanding the game? Ground-rule doubles...errors...balks...force outs..._

She shrugged and said, "Dad says I have a crush on Chipper Jones but it's not true. I just enjoy watching him play. He's an excellent player and has a lot of leadership attributes that—"

_Bones has a favorite team and a favorite player?_

It's like who we were, and what we had, before she left, isn't who we are and what we have now that she's back. Look, I know nothing stays the same—you know, stepping into a moving stream and so on—but I feel lost. There's a part of me that feels even farther apart now that she's back than I did even when she was gone. It's like their lives went on without me, while I was stuck back here like some kind of dumb-ass afterthought in an endless holding pattern, and no one saw fit to tell me that everything changed in the meantime, so now that they're home and it's obvious that life went on without me, I feel...

_I don't know how I feel._

I feel rootless and unmoored, as if even the really basic things that I thought I understood about my partner weren't even sure anymore. Bones used to hate sports, and told me more than once that organized sporting events were ways for men to show their fitness as warriors and something or other. Now she likes baseball.

I feel so far away...far away from who they are now. I feel like I don't know anything...like I don't belong in their lives the way I used to before...like they've moved on without me somehow, and how I'm playing catch-up, but since I don't know the rules or what happened in all that time, I don't know how to close the distance between us.

Everything between us feels so far apart.

I leaned my head back, staring once more at the ceiling as I swallowed.

So far apart.

I lay there for several minutes, just thinking, when I felt her hand reach out and touch me. Her fingertips moved over my hip and across the lower part of my abdomen, her index finger arcing over my belly button as I felt her pinky thread through the top of my pubic hair.

"Bones," I whispered as I felt her slide across the bed and tuck her warm, soft body against mine.

"Booth," she answered back. "I..."

I shook my head and pushed her away, wincing a little as I felt her fingers pull away from my skin, then rolled over onto my left side to face her.

"No," I murmured, cupping my hand over her hair and stroking her temple with my thumb in the pale moonlight. "Just—no..."

Our eyes met and she looked at me, her pale eyes gray in the dim light of our room. She opened her mouth to speak. "But..."

"No," I said again, the lone word passing through my clenched teeth almost as a growl. I didn't want to talk. I didn't want words, because it seemed that every time she opened her mouth to tell me something, I felt farther and farther away—like a stranger, miles apart from who she was now.

I covered her mouth with mine and heard the quiet hum in her throat as I swept my tongue into her mouth. This—this was the same. This hadn't changed: the way her body, so warm and soft and yet so lean and strong, felt against mine; the way her slender lips felt against mine; the way her tongue danced with mine when we kissed; the way she tasted; the way she smelled in the morning, her sweat sweet and musky in my nose as I held her close; the little noises she made as she got more and more turned on each time our tongues met and our hips began grinding together as we kissed.

I pulled away from her mouth, to take a breath and to stroke her beautiful cheekbone once with my thumb before letting my hand slide to her shoulder. I gave her a gentle push and rolled her onto her back, quickly moving into my favorite place in the world—between her legs—as I leaned over her and kissed her again, murmuring against her lips with pleasure as I felt her thighs, so warm and silky, close around my hips as her fingernails scraped against my stubbly morning beard.

"I love you," I whispered as I broke the kiss and, with a hard roll of my hips, slid home as she gasped beneath me.

"Ohhh, God," she sighed, reaching her hands around my waist and drawing her nails up my back as I began to move inside of her. "I love you, Booth. I missed—"

I cut her off with another wet, grasping kiss. All I wanted was to feel. Not to listen. Not to think. Not to talk. Just to feel, to drown myself in the only thing that hadn't changed between us, to feel a little less far apart even if for only a little while. I leaned into my hands and rocked into her, gently but putting as much weight and momentum as I could behind each stroke, pressing deeper each time I rose up into her. I closed my eyes, trying to lose myself in the feel of her, my nostrils filling with the sweet, earthy smell of her sweat as I felt the slightly round curve of her belly stick to my skin as we moved together. I smiled faintly as I listened to her sighs and quiet moans grow louder, the scarcely-intelligible strings of sounds that passed from her lips telling me she was getting closer to where I wanted her to be.

_"Ohmygodjesusboothpleaseohgod ..."_

I felt her back arch off the mattress and a loud grunt followed by a long, sloping sigh fill the room as her body quivered around me. Even in the dim twilight, I could see that her face and chest were flushed as her nails streaked down my back and her hands came to rest on my ass. I grinned and sucked in a deep breath as she squeezed my ass, and I drove into her—once, twice and a third time before she sighed again, and hearing that cute little sigh and the kittenish murmur that followed was all I needed to break completely. I emptied myself into her with a grunt and held myself there, as deeply as I could, covering every inch of her body I could with mine as I rode out the last flashes of my release.

"Booth," she said quietly as I opened my eyes to find her looking up at me with lazy, darkened blues.

"I know, Bones," I whispered back.

_I know._

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**A/N: **_That's what the muse coughed up this morning after I was a bad girl and peeked at the promos._

_Please, tell me what you think. Take a moment to leave a review. Pretty, pretty please?_


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